Press Kit - Memento Films International

what would actually drive you to do this’ But not do it in a way that would be so
extreme that it throws you off the idea.”
The answer, for Mickle, laid in religion. “Religions often become corrupt from the
places where they began. People often have an incredible blind faith that drives
them to do things simply because they’ve been done before, without ever really
thinking about it,” he says. “It’s about the only thing we could think of that convinces
mass groups of people to kill one another and not feel guilty about it.” Adds Damici,
“Religious extremism today says that, ‘If I kill, and God says that’s okay, it’s good.’
That gave the two a launching point. “It was interesting to explore,” says Mickle,
“how something could actually convince you to do something so horrid. But if you
grew up with it, and it’s the only thing you’ve ever known, and the people you trust
are telling you the way it is, is that all that much crazier than any religion So it was
kind of fun to take that idea and stretch it, but try to keep it as realistic as possible.”
Since the original film provided no backstory on the family, Mickle and Damici
realized they were free to create any kind of religion they liked, as well as invent
its history, some of which is dramatized in flashbacks in the film. Says Damici,
“We started to ask ourselves, ‘Well, how did this family come about’ We came up
with this history of a stranded family, as we see in the flashbacks to the 1700s.
They have to eat meat, but to cope with the method of providing it, they make it
part of their religion. We thought, ‘Wow – imagine this guy whose religion is to eat
people’. The question then becomes, ‘How do you make that real’”
One way was through the various pieces of the mythology of the religion, most of
which is laid out through the treasured family book, which details both the history
and procedures to which the Parkers must refer. “It’s not unlike any religion,”
Mickle says. “Every religion has its signature book, which is sort of a manual, in
some ways. In our case, it’s a cookbook.”
One of the things the book details is the procedure for carving up a freshly-killed
neighbor for consumption purposes, as the girls must do with poor Mrs. Stratton.
“That was a lot of back and forth, between Jim and me,” Damici recalls, “Jim gave
me a book on butchering meat. He didn’t want to do a whole graphic sequence
where we’re gonna cut the body and chop up the meat. He came to me and said,
‘How cool would it be if we just mark it out, the different cuts, the way butchers do